From "Nagarjuna's Letter To A Friend", translated by the Padmakara group:

Although performing wrong and evil deedsDoes not at once, like swords, create a gash,When death arrives, those evil acts will show,Their karmic fruit will clearly be revealed.

The aggregates are not a simple whim,From neither time nor nature do they come,Nor by themselves, from God, or without cause;Their source, you ought to know, is ignorance,From karmic deeds and craving have they come.

dzogchungpa wrote:From "Nagarjuna's Letter To A Friend", translated by the Padmakara group:

Although performing wrong and evil deedsDoes not at once, like swords, create a gash,When death arrives, those evil acts will show,Their karmic fruit will clearly be revealed.

The aggregates are not a simple whim,From neither time nor nature do they come,Nor by themselves, from God, or without cause;Their source, you ought to know, is ignorance,From karmic deeds and craving have they come.

In space‘spaciousness (emptiness-interdependence, form-emptiness/emptiness-form), there is no cristallizing, no substantial samsara. But the creating mind is a magician.Whether samsara or nirvana, Longchenpa: “the source is endless beginningless uncreated field of reality”. When a thought tries to understand this, cristallizing is a fact. Woopsee.

Oh, a master said on a travel to a religious one ( when he asked from what religion the master was) something like: "my God is from where your God is coming from" A created God as a thought its source is the uncreated field of reality.

Whether samsara or nirvana, Longchenpa: “the source is endless beginningless uncreated field of reality”. When a thought tries to understand this, cristallizing is a fact. Woopsee.

Longchenpa and Nagarjuna do not necessarily agree with each other.

There are many contradictions arising during attempts of uttering the ineffable, sconceptualizing the non-conceptual.This is why philosophies are secondary to practice and experience.

Exactly.Without a determined effort to find out what the whole truth is for ourselves and resolve the contradictions, contemplating and debating abstract theory is nothing more than a frivolous pastime.

mindyourmind wrote:Along come the Buddhists, "believing" in karma and rebirth, but not in a creator god. To put it in its simplest form, where does karma / rebirth "come from"? Who created such an exquisitely complex system, if there is no god?

Please be as technical and detailed as you can, I have been bet a case of beer that the Buddhist cannot meaningfully answer this, and that the best we can do is to ask questions like "Who's asking" and "ask your teacher".

The beginning:

"From an inconstruable beginning comes transmigration. A beginning point is not evident, though beings hindered by ignorance and fettered by craving are transmigrating & wandering on. Long have you thus experienced stress, experienced pain, experienced loss, swelling the cemeteries — enough to become disenchanted with all fabricated things, enough to become dispassionate, enough to be released."http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka ... .than.html

The end:

"I tell you, friend, that it is not possible by traveling to know or see or reach a far end of the cosmos where one does not take birth, age, die, pass away, or reappear. But at the same time, I tell you that there is no making an end of suffering & stress without reaching the end of the cosmos. Yet it is just within this fathom-long body, with its perception & intellect, that I declare that there is the cosmos, the origination of the cosmos, the cessation of the cosmos, and the path of practice leading to the cessation of the cosmos."http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka ... .than.html

smcj wrote:Just a footnote; one definition for 'God' in christian thought is 'the uncaused cause'. In other words they don't have an answer to the infinite regression question of 'where did God come from', so they answer it by saying, in effect, that God caused himself. That of course is a paradox. Whereas the Buddhists simply say that there is an infinite regression, also a paradox. So either tradition's answer is a paradox.